Styra Inc. is offering a double-barreled approach to bolstering security and compliance in the cloud-native world.

Through the company’s open-source Open Policy Agent, software developers can apply security and compliance policies to the Kubernetes container orchestration platform. Styra is also providing a software-as-a-service declarative authorization service product — Styra DAS — to help enterprises ensure that workloads are compliant with internal and external regulation.

“Our focus on privacy and security is higher than it’s ever been before,” said Bill Mann (pictured), chief executive officer of Styra. “If these applications are going to be way more complex and distributed and we’re going to innovate faster, then the way we focus on security and privacy has to be done differently. Styra is focused on reinventing policy and authorization in the cloud-native stack.”

Mann spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed ways to improve authorization controls in the expanding cloud-native ecosystem and the value of enterprise contributors. (* Disclosure below.)

Support for microservices

In April, Styra added new features to its DAS product that included a curated set of Kubernetes policies and a way to enforce policies as apps move into production. That was followed a month later by the news that Styra DAS would now support microservices and extend context-based authorization to the service mesh.

“It’s policy-as-code,” Mann said. “You can describe in a declarative model how you want the policy for a system to be developed. It’s about getting everybody, all enterprises and vendors, to use OPA as a way of solving authorization for the cloud native environment.”

Major enterprises and vendors appear to be embracing Styra’s authorization solutions. OPA contributors now include Google LLC, Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and Goldman Sachs. The company also supports a developer community of 1,200 users, according to a recent blog post from Mann.

“The most important part of a community is that you learn how enterprises are using your software,” Mann said. “They share ideas, they share use cases, and you’re able to innovate really fast. We want to have developers learn this now, because if they can incorporate this into DevOps app stack, then in future years when these applications are built and exposed they’ll be more secure.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Styra Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Styra nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE